A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  All these campaigns were revolutionary in ways that neither Tom Paine nor Mary Wollstonecraft could have imagined. They gave rise to the first professionally organized popular pressure groups. To defeat the Protestant landlords’ chosen incumbents in Ireland, O’Connell used paid agents, carefully compiled voters’ lists, and organized travel for those who needed it to get to the polls. The abolitionists were prepared, if necessary, to organize a systematic boycott throughout the country of West Indian sugar, which, given the enormous numbers involved in the campaign and the existence, since the Napoleonic wars, of commercially farmed sugar beet, might well have inflicted huge economic damage on West Indian slave owners. And they all brought the old instrument of the petition into the age of mass mobilization. Hundreds of thousands of signatures would be gathered, sewn into one immensely elongated sheet designed specifically for the spectacular effect, and delivered to the floor of the House of Commons by a supporting MP. If the organizers had done their job properly, the petitions would be so weighty that they would need four or even eight members to carry them into the chamber. In the first three years of the 1830s, 4000 such petitions were brought to parliament. The best research now suggests that fully one in five adult males had signed their name on an abolitionist petition in 1787, 1814 or 1833. Even more astonishingly, the petition of the women of Britain bore 187,000 names and needed four members to lug it on to the floor of the House in a scene that would have made Mary Wollstonecraft happy had she been alive to witness it.

  In the hands of the new social church, politics became a theatre of virtue; one in which the assumption of authority by old, tight-hosed lechers at court and parliament seemed increasingly grotesque. The traditional symbols of power – coats of arms and battlemented manors – now gave way to the travelling exhibition, organized by men such as the great abolitionists, the MP William Wilberforce and the writer Thomas Clarkson, who displayed whips and chains, models of slave ships and the commodities used in the trade of humans. Instead of an image of the king, Clarkson’s famous print of the sardine-can slave ship with hundreds of bodies crammed between decks, or Blake’s horrifying prints of the sadistic treatment meted out to rebel slaves were seen everywhere in Britain, in public places and private houses alike.

  By the end of the decade party divisions seemed less important than moral boundaries separating the righteous from the heedless. Abolitionism finally brought together in the same big tent William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth; the privileged inside the system and the vocal outside it. And the campaigns were capable of bringing about changes of heart in men who had sworn they would never tamper with the best of all constitutions. As prime minister, the Duke of Wellington felt that he had no choice but to assent to Catholic emancipation as the price of buying off O’Connell’s formidable Catholic Association. And the Whigs, who for many years were no keener than the Tories on parliamentary reform, were now faced with the possibility of their own redundancy should they not find some way to harness the steam-driven energy of moral radicalism to their own old coach and four.

  The summer of 1830 unexpectedly gave them their chance but it also confronted them with an end to procrastination. The countryside – the same countryside that plodded gently along in Constable’s landscapes; the country that was still celebrated as the solid heartland of Old England, the imperturbable realm of squire and parson – went up in smoke, exactly (suspiciously, some thought) as Cobbett had predicted. He made no secret, in fact, of his sympathy: ‘Never, let what will happen, will these people lie down and starve quietly.’ The winter had been very bad. As usual, the consequences were high prices, labourers unemployed or put on short hire, and starvation wages. But this time the ‘army’ of ‘Captain Swing’ made itself felt, burning hayricks and smashing threshing machines. Swing cut a huge swathe through southern England, as far west as Dorset and as far east as East Anglia and Lincolnshire. Pitched battles between yeomanry and rebels broke out in Hampshire, Cobbett’s home county, Kent and east Sussex, close to where he had addressed a crowd of 500 at Battle – a coincidence that put him on trial in 1831, with the predictable acquittal. Nearly 2000 Swing prisoners were put on trial and 19 were executed, but more than 200 other death sentences were commuted to Australian transportation.

  The great argument for pre-emptive reform came from France, where another revolution in July 1830 had removed the Bourbon king Charles X and replaced him with Louis-Philippe, the son of the Duke of Orléans who had sat in the first Revolution’s Convention as ‘Philippe Egalité’. The power of historical memory was sobering and unhesitatingly used by Whig historians and orators like the young Thomas Babington Macaulay. Only timely reform, they argued, would prevent a modern revolution from happening in Britain. But the Tory prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, who had accepted Catholic emancipation, put up the barricades. ‘The state of representation’, he said, ‘was the best available’ and he ‘would never introduce and always resist parliamentary reform’. As it became known that King William IV felt much the same way, the monarch’s popularity evaporated.

  But the consensus that repression without reform would calm the country was collapsing within the political elite. It was now an argument about the wisest means of collective self-preservation. By November 1830 Wellington was gone, and the first Whig administration since before the Revolution of 1789 took office on condition that a measure of parliamentary reform would be introduced. The new prime minister, Charles Grey, Charles James Fox’s protégé, had first attempted a Reform Bill almost 40 years before. This, at last, would be the endlessly delayed vindication of that ‘40 years’ war’. Since this Whig government was at least as aristocratic as the Tories (Grey himself was an earl), few were prepared for the thunderbolt that struck when the details of reform were unveiled in the Commons in March 1831. Macaulay described with pardonable over-excitement the state of shock on the Tory front bench: ‘… the jaw of Peel fell, and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul and Herries looked like Judas’. They could be forgiven their consternation. Some 140 boroughs with fewer than 4000 residents were to lose either one or two members (60 being wiped out altogether), who were to be redistributed to the new towns of industrial Britain and to London.

  Between the time that this first bill went down to defeat in the Lords and its reintroduction, the more apocalyptic warnings of the Whigs seemed about to be fulfilled. Riots broke out in Derbyshire, Nottingham and Bristol, where the Bishop’s Palace was burned to the ground. In the coal and iron country of south Wales (where there had already been a serious strike in 1816), hunger fused with political anger when a crowd at Merthyr Tydfil attacked a courtroom, liberated pro-reform prisoners and took over the town. A detachment of cavalry from Swansea was ambushed and hundreds of troops had to be sent from Monmouth before some sort of order was restored.

  Against this background of gathering chaos and violence, a new election was called. The campaign was, for once, taken to almost every town in the country, big and small, with very clear principles dividing the contending parties. The result was a Whig majority big enough to demand from a mortified William IV the instant creation of 50 new peers, enough to carry the measure through the Upper House, where it had been twice rejected. The Reform Bill became law in June 1832. Most historians have insisted on its deep social conservatism: the preservation, not the destruction, of the aristocratic flavour and dominance of land. And that was, in fact, the intention of the Whigs. ‘No-one,’ as Macaulay wrote, ‘wished to turn the Lords out of their House except here and there a crazy radical whom the boys on the street point at as he walks along.’ On the contrary, by betting on anti-revolutionary instincts of the £10 household suffrage (granting the vote only to men holding property worth £10), the Whig grandees like Lord John Russell, Earl Grey and Viscount Durham believed that it was more likely to preserve the stabilizing power of the aristocracy from the threat of all-out ‘American’ democracy. Their aim was to split a potentially much more dangerous alliance between middle-c
lass moralizing activists and truly radical, universal-suffrage democrats.

  The strategy worked. The reform made half a million Britons new voters and created a new House of Commons, one that had room for Daniel O’Connell, ‘Orator’ Henry Hunt, Thomas Atwood and William Cobbett – the last, somewhat improbably, the member for industrial Oldham. This was a parliament in which a vague air of common-sensical liberalism had indeed stopped revolution in its tracks (although there would still be countryside riots, the worst in Kent in 1838). And yet the changes did matter. When Cobbett threw one of his ‘Chopstick Festivals’ for 7000 labourers to celebrate the Reform Act, supplying 70lb of ham and wagonloads of mutton, beef and veal, he knew he was seeing the bloodless death of ‘Old Corruption’; the sweeping away of ‘potwallopers’, placemen and pocket boroughs.

  Conversely, there was a reason why King William IV was so beside himself with rage that he could not bring himself to sign the act, leaving it to royal commissioners. In 1829, with the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, the monopoly of the Church of England had gone. Now the independence of the House of Lords had been irreversibly compromised by the threatened instant creation of a politically pliant majority. And with the recognition of the campaigning success of Thomas Atwood’s Birmingham Political Union, so soon after O’Connell in Ireland, the way was open (although it would not be immediately taken) for the machinery of modern party politics, using all the techniques of mobilization pioneered by the abolitionists and the emancipators – hustings, mass petitions, newspaper campaigns – to contest power in Britain.

  A year later, in 1833, the reformed but still undemocratic Commons made Britain the first nation to outlaw slavery in all its colonies, at a time, notwithstanding recent historical writing, when the demand for slave-products was increasing and not diminishing. It had been destroyed, overwhelmingly, by the force of moral argument; by the final victory of the view that argued for a common human nature. Which is not to say that when the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834 the fire could be taken as some sort of providential announcement of a new age of moral miracles. The victories had still been only partial. Catholics now had access to office but in Ireland had lost the 40-shilling freehold vote. It was replaced, as in the counties of mainland Britain, by the suffrage bar – of the £10 annual household rental – which effectively excluded the vast majority of those who had lined up behind Paine, Cobbett and Hunt. True manhood suffrage would have to wait until 1918. Even in the Caribbean, slave-holding plantation owners had to be compensated for their losses; and initially a system of transitional ‘apprenticeship’ created a twilight world between servitude and genuine freedom.

  Nothing had quite worked out as any of the forces of nature had imagined. The British had not walked their way to democracy and social justice. The ramblers and peripatetics had, in fact, been overtaken by a high-speed, steam-driven, economic revolution which they were powerless to arrest, much less reverse. And yet, industrial Britain – the most extraordinary transformation in the history of Europe – had happened, so far without bloody revolution. An age which had begun with fast roads had been replaced by another with unimaginably faster railway trains. Some of them, to Wordsworth’s dismay, were violating the sanctuary of the Lakes; belching smoke, making a demonic noise and bringing working people virtually to his doorstep. There were walkers all right, hordes of them, carrying with them Thomas West’s and his own guide, in a hurry to mark off the obligatory stops on the route. He had himself become a tourist site.

  This wasn’t what he wanted at all. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth believed that the British countryside ought to be the antidote to, not the accomplice of, modernity. But the opposites had somehow come together, got inside each other; country people wanting town things; town people yearning for a piece of the countryside. And they got it. The most industrial society in the world was also the most attached to its village memories. Within every early Victorian town were green spaces and places: miniaturized corners of the country, created as a palliative or memento of what had been lost. The railway companies gave their workers allotments beside the tracks where they could grow vegetables and flowers or keep a pig and some chickens, an echo of the strips and common land they had lost in the enclosures. It was not Cobbett’s imagined Merrie England of village greens, small ale and roast beef, but people were still better off for having the allotment than they would have been without. For the first time, too, thanks to pioneers of green spaces like John Claudius Loudon, a ‘park’ meant not the private estate of an aristocrat but a public place where there were no barriers of class or property; designed, as in the park at Birkenhead, opened to the public in 1847, with rambles and cricket pitches, ponds and meadows; the kind of place where ordinary Britons could come and give their children something of nature’s pleasures. Such places were not, I suppose, sublime. But neither were they at all ridiculous.

  CHAPTER

  3

  THE QUEEN

  AND THE HIVE

  SOMEWHERE – BEYOND THE 24-ton lump of coal; the 80-blade Sportsman’s Knife; the mechanical oyster opener billed as ‘The Ostracide’; beyond the Gutta Percha Company’s steamship furniture (convertible into a buoyant liferaft in case of mishap); beyond the tea party of stuffed stoats – were the glass beehives, designed by John Milton ‘Inventor of London’. The little queen, in her pink watered-silk gown and tiara, stopped in front of the exhibit and peered in at the teeming occupants. What struck her most was their virtuous indifference to public inspection. There was honey to be made and they got on with making it. ‘Her Majesty and Prince Albert frequently bestowed their notice on the wonderful operations of the gifted little insects whose undeviating attention to their own concerns in the midst of all the various distractions of sound and sight that surrounded them afforded an admirable lesson.’ It was a lesson that did not need labouring. There would be times when Victoria would feel the indecency of visibility. Ten years on, robbed of the long, protecting shadow of her husband, she would pull the curtains; douse the gaslight; bury herself in blackness.

  But not on this sparkling May Day 1851; ‘the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing’, she wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians. On this day, inside the Crystal Palace, Victoria was perfectly content to be the queen of the humming hive. She could return the stares of 30,000 season-ticket holders and feel nothing but a welling of sacred exhilaration. A misty drizzle had been falling as the queen and Albert rode up Rotten Row (a corruption of Route du roi – the Royal Way). But as if deferring to the majesty of the occasion (as Victoria noted), it had given way to the pearly sunshine of a Hyde Park spring. Passing through the Coalbrookdale iron gates and walking into the Palace, heralded by a blaze of trumpets, the space a mass of palm fronds and heaped flowers, Victoria was momentarily blinded by the radiance as 300,000 panes of glass, each exactly 49 inches by 10, flooded the space with intense light. It was, assuredly, the light of the Lord, who had, like her, recognized the goodness of her husband’s great work. Now, as he stood by her side, together with Vicky (the Princess Royal), in her Nottinghamshire lace and white satin with wild roses in her hair, and little Bertie, dashing in his Highland kilt, they were all washed by the effulgence. With the perfume of the eau-de-Cologne falling from the 20-foot crystal fountain, and her ears full of the euphony of a 600-voice choir and of the five organs strategically placed to exploit the building’s shuddery resonance, Victoria felt borne aloft into a state of sublime transcendence. She was not alone. The usually hard-bitten reporter of the Daily News waxed spiritual when he heard a sound akin to ‘the noise of many waters heard in some apocalyptic vision, making the hearts of the hearers vibrate like the glass of the edifice that inclosed them’.

  The prophetic visions swimming in the head of the Prince Consort – harmony; peace; unity within and between nations (sentiments exhaustively enumerated in a long speech, while his starstruck queen gazed adoringly on) – did not, on this particular May Day, seem unrealistically s
anctimonious. The Great Exhibition was in its way a sort of miracle. Although the Crystal Palace was the largest enclosed space on earth (more than one third of a mile long), it had been built from scratch in Hyde Park in just over six months (the principal construction taking just 17 weeks). Once Fox and Henderson, the glass and iron manufacturers, had received the basic design it took them a week to prepare full estimates, and the architect had taken just eight days from his original conception to draft a full set of working drawings.

  Despite initial apathy, even resistance, in parliament and carping in the press, Prince Albert’s enthusiasm finally inspired philanthropy, which was quick on its toes when it came and as sure of its mission as the designers and builders. Funding for the exhibition had been launched by some £70,000 of private subscriptions, after which guaranteed money had flowed in. But then the entire occasion confounded conventional expectations. The welcoming grace of the prefabricated and infinitely extendable building made nonsense of the romantic cant about the infernal grimness of industrial society. The rigidity of iron had been bent into lacy, feminine curves. Painted in the hues of medieval heraldry – yellow, red and blue – the interior, which had a Gothic Revival ‘medieval court’ as well as an array of piston-driven heavy machinery, seemed to announce the happy marriage of past and future. Although manufactures were supposed to be the death of artisanal craft, the Palace showcased both engineering and the best that artisans could produce. Every one of those panes had in fact been hand-blown. Together the iron and the glass wove a filigree web that, instead of blocking out open space, seemed to contain it as if in a delicate membrane. (There was in fact some not unjustified anxiety about whether the Crystal Palace would be leak-proof and wind-resistant.)